


Everyone Lives

by fraternite



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst, Anxiety, Gen, I've written a lot of angsty things but this is right up there with the best of them, seriously don't be fooled by the title
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-26
Updated: 2014-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-20 19:51:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1523522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraternite/pseuds/fraternite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They all survive the rebellion.  That doesn't mean they come out unscathed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everyone Lives

Everyone lives.

The National Guard takes to the sidestreets and back alleys, approaches that were supposed to be covered by the other barricades (the barricades which the Amis don’t realize have already surrendered). One minute everyone is sleeping or trying to sleep before the next attack, the two men on watch squinting in the dimness at the vague movements among the Guard’s lines; the next there are Guardsmen everywhere, they have a pistol to Enjolras’s head and bayonettes pointed at Combeferre’s chest and boots planted of Grantaire’s prone form, and the Amis have no choice but to surrender, almost before they even realize the battle is lost.

They are taken prisoner, but they are not executed (even Prouvaire, they learn, was not executed, the firing squad they heard a plot to break the revolutionaries’ spirits). The king doesn’t want martyrs. He wants failures, and he wants them alive, in exile and disgrace. And so they are shipped off to different countries in pairs, too quickly even to make plans to keep in touch or find each other again. The world, for all it seems smaller and more connected every day, is a large place, and their hopes of ever reuniting seem slim indeed.

Feuilly and Combeferre are sent to a place called “Georgia” in the United States. It’s hot, oppressively hot, and folks are suspicious of the foreigners, especially the dark-skinned one. After being accused of being a runaway slave scores of times, after being called “boy” hundreds of times, Feuilly closes down toward the people of this country. He grows bitter, assuming judgement and suspicion in every pale face he encounters. He starts getting in fights with white men. He starts visiting night meetings in the slave quarters of a nearby plantation, and the mutters about Judgement Day start getting louder. Combeferre’s heart is torn by the oppression he sees around him, the beatings and the broken families and the blatant injustice of a man owning another human being--but the events of 1832 have convinced him that violent rebellion is never an effective or moral response to oppression. He exhorts—then demands—that Feuilly rethink his choices. They argue constantly.

It’s always cold in the little Russian town where Bahorel and Joly settle down after weeks of wandering in search of work (Joly is taken on as medic at the fort and Bahorel as a guard). Their fingers freeze and the abandon their cheerful waistcoats for heavy coats of matted fur. Bahorel discovers the local liquor, a foul poison that burns the throat and rots the liver and is strong enough to numb, for a few hours, the pain of memories. He falls in with bad company. He gets in more fights. He kills a man. He is always gone, gone when Joly huddles over their tiny stove for a solitary dinner, gone when Joly awakes in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, gone when Joly comes home in tears after the scalpel slipped in his frostbitten fingers, severing an artery and killing the patient in minutes. Joly is left alone in the frigid little shack, to weep over his lost patient and to imagine Bahorel lying dead drunk in a ditch--or worse.

Jehan was once intrepid; now he is terrified. It wasn’t until he faced Death that he realized how very frightened to die he really is. Now he can’t stop thinking of all the things that could kill him: diseases, accidents, angry drunks, wild dogs. It doesn’t help that he and Bossuet were sent to one of France’s African colonies, where every animal, spider, and snake is unfamiliar and potentially lethal. Jehan tries, but he can’t master the fear; he is confined to the house, sometimes to the safety of the sweltering darkness under his blankets. Bossuet provides for them, but just barely. His bad luck has followed him out of France, and he suffers one setback after another--injuries and strange illnesses and mistakes that lose him job after job. He is not surprised (he stopped being surprised by misfortune long before 1832), but where once he used to greet Guignon as a familiar friend, now he just growls, “there you are, you fucker,” at each new blow.

Enjolras, as the leader of the rebellion, is sent to the ends of the earth—a hot, dangerous land called “Australia.” Marius is sent with him, and his relief at ending up in a place where he can speak the language is quickly replaced by chagrin on the realization that there is no demand in this rough, dangerous country for the translation of manuscripts into the French. The only work he can find is hard labor, digging privies and fencepost holes on a ranch. He sets himself humbly to the task, but he has always never been strong, and the manual labor wears him thin. He no longer dreams or waxes eloquent on the nature of love: He works, he eats, and he sleeps a dreamless, thoughtless sleep. Enjolras, for his part, never learns to speak English adequately; his mind, brilliant as it is, has never been suited to the learning of languages. Adrift in a country where he doesn’t understand either the language or the people, he has no cause to fight for. No cause to live for. He continues to live—he feeds himself and works and sleeps—but he doesn’t know why.

"We shouldn’t have survived," Grantaire slurs, as Courfeyrac tries vainly to peel him from the counter of the cafe where he’s curled up around a bottle of rum. It’s the middle of the afternoon, and he’s still sober enough to speak, which is unusual these days. "Don’t say that," Courfeyrac retorts. "We’re alive. That’s something. We have each other." (Do they? Does it count as having each other when one of you spends most of his time drunk to the point of incomprehensibility or just passed out?) "I’m glad we survived," Courfeyrac insists, as Grantaire groans and bends over to vomit into the sand. "Whatever happens, I’m glad we’re alive." (His eyes are dull and the words lose a little conviction every time he says them.)

Everyone lives, but they are not the same.


End file.
